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At the end of last week, the team made the call to drill the rock ‘Rock Hall,’ and Curiosity had no problems drilling the target. The science team had been worried that this rock type, red Jura, might be particularly hard based on the observation that it commonly caps the highs on Vera Rubin Ridge.

Even on Mars, where every second of Curiosity’s sol is planned, things don’t always go quite as expected. This morning we learned that Curiosity didn’t complete her planned drive yesterday and instead stopped at the mid-drive point.

This Navcam image shows the outcrop of red Jura rock that the rover will image during the weekend drive. Obtaining higher resolution images of this exposure will help the team determine if it could be drilled next week.

And what a week it has been. InSight’s successful landing is surely the biggest news of the week. We now have a new robotic Martian ready to help unlock more clues about the origins, history, and evolution of Mars.

Curiosity was happy and healthy after the Thanksgiving holiday, but experienced a minor post-holiday hiccup during a test of delivering sample portions to the workspace. The rover’s robotic arm tripped a safety limit such that the activity did not quite go to completion.

Today Curiosity is preparing for the imminent arrival of a new visitor to Mars, just as many of us are preparing for the out-of-town visitors who’ll be descending into our homes over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Today we planned to deliver a sample of the ground up rock from our Highfield drill hole to the SAM instrument. The rover will open one of its SAM inlet covers and the arm will be moved over to the top of it…

Following a successful weekend of science activities at the ‘Highfield’ drill site, today we’re planning Sols 2229-2230. We’re eagerly awaiting data from CheMin, which will tell us all about the mineralogy of our newest drill hole sample.

Tosol (Martian for “today”) we received confirmation that Curiosity’s drill yestersol was successful, as shown in this Navcam image of the ‘Highfield’ target – our eighteenth drill hole in the martian surface!

Today was a good day on Mars. The science and engineering teams are making preparations to drill a patch of grey bedrock named ‘Highfield’, which will be our latest attempt to characterize this unique rock unit on Vera Rubin Ridge.